Resolution 2026: Mia Segal, Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio, and Hui-Hsin Lu

Resolution 2026 : Mia Segal, Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio, Hui-Hsin Lu, January 15

This evening’s performance of Resolution 2026, the annual festival of new choreography at The Place, covers, as usual, a wide variety of subjects using the language of contemporary dance. It is a huge undertaking, showcasing 60 companies over 20 nights, with three performances a night. Trying to find a link between them — if there is one — is the preserve of The Place’s artistic staff, but for an audience the sometimes elusive discovery of coherence in the choreographic language can be very rewarding.

Hui-Hsin Lu’s Follow Me!! — with its two interjection marks — sets out to be a ‘playful dance and live music performance exploring the phenomenon of modern-day following, from social media trends to everyday conformity.’ Works that explore social media trends can too easily get carried away by the superficial interjection culture they are exploring without acknowledging their darker ramifications. Follow Me!! is no exception. With an impressive array on stage of three dancers (Lili Schroeder, Yu-Chen Chiu and Ka Ki Christina Lai) and four musicians (James Shing Mu Cheng, Sachin Beaman-Patel, Santi Lowe and Dom Fellows), the translation of important ideas — ‘how we move collectively and what it means to lose or rediscover individuality in a world of constant influence’ — into choreography takes on a comic-book simplicity that never gets beyond a caricatural treatment of the subject. Rather than approaching the subject comedically, it might be better to think of it seriously and let the audience decide where the humour and the darkness lie. 

Mia Segal’s A Human Touch begins with an open call to the members of the audience to hug the person next to them, or nearest to them. ‘Think of the last time you gave someone a hug’, urges Segal in the introduction to her work on the free sheet. ‘Was it today? Yesterday? Can you even remember?’ Having followed the suggestion and hugged someone I didn’t know in the row in front of me, I can’t say I was convinced by Segal’s thesis that ‘In a world defined by independence and isolation, we’ve forgotten how to touch.’ It wasn’t that I had forgotten how to touch but that the consensual agreement to touch (presumably the nature of touch Segal is suggesting) did not exist between me and the man in front of me prior to Segal’s invitation. That may also have been the case for dancers and co-creators Amanda Pang and Caitlin Macleod before they started rehearsing, but in A Human Touch they make a very convincing bond that merges the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of human intimacy. As theatre, their performance obviates the need for any verbal contextualisation, leaving the audience to ruminate on aspects of the human spirit Pang and Macleod so beautifully express. Their opening hug is memorable for its intensity and sincerity, and for much of the work these qualities remain. Segal’s choreography can, however, veer from the convincing to the contrived, but she and the performers always manage to bring our focus back to the power and intimacy of touch.

Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio’s intergenerational collaboration, Collapsing Into The Equilibrium,‘is inspired by glaciers — their struggle for existence and the inevitable collapse’. There are no glaciers on stage but they are represented by armfuls of white packing paper, either flat or scrunched up into crinkly forms. Gauhe and DiMeglio are the human, interactive, agency moving these paper glaciers and changing their shape. They are sometimes under the paper, sometimes on it, wrapped in it or carrying it. But in moments of silence, the qualities of the paper itself give it a life (and death) of its own. When we watch this intrinsic struggle of the paper as a living entity holding and releasing its form while we listen to Ludwig Berger’s audio recordings of dying glaciers, the overlapping effect is mesmerising. Gauhe and DiMeglio draw parallels to this struggle in their own empathetic interactions of equilibrium and support suggesting the fragile but vital unity of life and its environment. In their final pose they face the audience, leaning against each other in solidarity as if to pass on to us the enormous challenge they have so lucidly illustrated. Over the years Gauhe has developed similar calls to action, pointing out the hazards of allowing our human footprint to wander unthinkingly over the potentially devastating forces of nature. Collapsing Into The Equilibrium serves as an eloquent manifesto.